


The Gates of Hell Shall Not Shake It

by dimircharmer



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bro PoV, Bro is Not A Good Guardian, Gen, Monster Hunters AU, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 03:39:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6549049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world without Sburb, Bro and Dave become monster hunters instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gates of Hell Shall Not Shake It

**Author's Note:**

> In honour of Homestuck ending, I remixed an old fic I wrote back in 20 fucking 13. So enjoy, I guess.

The baby came on a meteor, and it brought something capital E Evil with it. You pick the baby off, dust him off, and find him a pair of mirrored shades, the miniature of yours. You make the baby wear them constantly for kicks.

That shitty joke saves your lives. The first time you invited someone over, and they looked at the puppet with bare eyes, you had to burn them both. You remember, on the outskirts of Houston, watching lighter fluid and fire consume what used to be a human, and what you were damn sure was more than wood and cloth and chipped ventriloquist paint. They pop and crackle as they burn, and the smoke smells like sulfur and brimstone, curling oily into the night. The kid watches from the flatbed of your truck, eyes red, red, red. You found a news report, a few years later, about a young couple found dead, whose baby went missing along with his unique antique ventriloquist dummy.

You remember you used to like puppets.

You raise him as best you can, more a brother than a father, and train him to take care of the supernatural bullshit that almost took care of the two of you. He learns how to use a sword before he knows how to use a microwave, and can make better fake IDs than you can by the time he’s ten years old.

You named him David, after the angel, because the two of you need all the help you could get.

You have this shitty, rusted out pick-up truck, brick red, with a false bottom under the seats. In the back, there’s camping supplies, and bottles of holy water. Under the seats you have katanas made of blessed silver, and cold iron, and enough salt to preserve a moose. You keep some mechanical equipment with you too. You keep the truck running like a dream, despite the fact that it’s older than the two of you combined.

You get the kid a tricked-out IPhone for Christmas one year. He runs an extremely prolific photography website, and you know he’s turned down invitations to do commissioned work to keep hunting with you. You’ve never talked to him about it.

*

When Dave was thirteen, you hunt a hellhound on the coast of California. The thing is fuck-off huge, and pure white, except where its teeth are stained red. You’re crossing blades with it, katana to teeth and claws, and you’re _losing._ You flash-step away from it, faster than should strictly be possible, but even that isn’t quite fast enough, and it nails you clean in the chest with a swipe of its paw. You go flying, into one of those trees that hippies have to hold hands together to get around, and you’re stunned.

You can hear, more than see it approach, giant paws sinking inches deep into forest mulch. It rests one of them on your heaving chest. You can feel its claws poke holes in your shirt, one of them dead centre in the middle of your sternum.

It’s really more the size of a bear, than a wolf. Half a polar bear, it raises it’s featureless, blank white head and howls, green energy sparking through its fur, arching green with terrible otherworldly energy. You think, absurdly, of the bright white cue balls of the puppet that came with Dave, of the terrible sparking green that possessed the electrician when they came in to inspect your fuses.

The thing splits horribly along the cheek and jowl, revealing teeth in a mouth that wasn’t there a moment before. It huffs putrid breath across your face, and you close your eyes behind your shades.

“Bec!”

You open your eyes again.

Dave is on the back of a motor cycle, clinging for dear life around the middle of a girl who can’t be much older than he is. She pulls off her motorcycle helmet, and a pair of bright white ears pop out of her tangle of black hair.

“Bec, _heel._ ”

Miracle of fucking miracles, the hellhound backs off.

The girl is staring at it with her hands on her hips, frowning around a pair of buckteeth. The hellhound slinks over to her, and sits. Hunched over, head down, the shoulders of the dog tower over her, even though as low as it’s head is hanging, it and the girl are roughly eye-to-eye.

“ _Bad Dog.”_ She intones, and swats it on the nose with a roll of newspaper.

Dave, windswept and panicked as you’ve ever seen him, stumbles off the back of the bike, and throws up against a tree. You sit there, dazed, and wonder what the hell just happened.

The girl’s name, as it turns out, is Jade, and she’s been bonded with the hellhound since she was three. Her explanation has far more nuclear physics in it than you have any chance of following, but it seems to boil down to ‘demon portal, dead alternate reality me, ears a furry would die for.’ She serves them pumpkin soup and raw venison, in a cabin on the coast, and her and Dave exchange numbers before they go.

It’s the only number in the phone that isn’t yours, and you have to repress a totally inappropriate surge of jealousy whenever you see him texting her.

You double your training routine, and drive Dave harder than ever so neither of you will be caught off guard like that ever again.

*

When Dave is fourteen, the Midwest has a ghost problem so severe even regular people are starting to post pictures, so you pack up the truck, load up on rock salt and silver bells, and make your way down to Suburbia, USA. Every house looks the goddamn same, with the exception of garage on the left, garage on the right, and the choice between picturesque flowerbeds or picturesque tire swings. Dave doesn’t even look up from his phone as you pass them by, and you wonder what he’d be like if he grew up in a house like that, instead of a truck like this. You look at the reflection of his phone screen in his glasses, and think that of all the Daves that could have been, you’re sure you’ve raised the best one.

“Now call me obvious,” He drawls in the Texan accent you’re sure he cultivates to make sure he doesn’t lose, “But I think that’s the house we’re looking for.”

You follow his finger, and pull the truck onto the sidewalk-less suburban curb. The house in question has a pair of honest-to-god poltergeists dancing around the roof, cackling.

“Would you look at that.” You say, getting a pair of silver swords out from under your seat. “Knew I kept you around for a reason.”

Dave smirks at you, and tosses you a box of salt in exchange for one of the swords. So armed, you make your way to the front steps of the house. The front door is ajar. As you push through it, you feel something shift, and before you know what’s happening, you’re soaked. A bucket clatters to the floor by your feet.

“What.” You say.

Dave pokes your shirt, and then rubs his fingers together. “I would say, bro, that we have been bamboozled. Subjects of a hornswoggling. Ensnared in a dastardly plot to dupe the undupable.”

He sniffs his fingers. “I would say, in fact, that we have moved beyond a mere swindling and landed squarely in the middle of a bamboozlement.”

He points at the frame of the door. “Someone balanced a bucket of holy water on the top of the door, bro, and we were taken in by the deception.”

“Huh.” You say, and look around the entry way of the house. A massive, hulking shape of a spirit is lurking in the middle of the hallway, and is staring at you and Dave in a decidedly confused manor. It is at this moment that someone from upstairs yells in a voice that hasn’t stopped cracking yet,

“Fire in the hole!”

From the top of the stairs, a boy launches himself whooping down into the main hallway, sledgehammer swinging right down after him. He slams it into the ghost as he falls, and instead of passing right through like you’d expect a mundane tool to do, it pulps the ghost into ectoplasm. He lands heavily on the hallway, slings his hammer over one shoulder, and pushes sticky hair back from his forehead.

“Hi!” He says, mouth full of braces, “I’m John!”

John’s hammer has a pouf on the end of it, the kind that Victorian ladies used to powder their noses, and you can smell the rosemary and graveyard dirt wafting off it from nearly ten feet away.

“Goddamn,” Dave says, “That’s a hell of a swing you’ve got there, Babe Ruth.”

Joh grins, totally unconcerned about the fact that he looks like he took a bath in ectoplasm, and says, “Duck!”

You and Dave duck, and a man in an impeccable white button down shirt and fedora dives through the door overtop of you, and slams what looks like a pie tin full of shaving cream squarely into the centre of John’s face. The ectoplasm coating on the kid peels off of him like a bad sunburn, drying and flaking into easily removable pieces.

John shakes his head like a wet dog, and wipes the excess shaving cream on his glasses off on his shirt.

John’s dad ruffles his hair. “Good work, son.”

 

“Thanks dad,” John says.

Dave gets John’s number before you go too. His dad sometimes asks where you’ll be in the next week and sends care packages. One of them contains a pair of aviators from John, and you try to convince yourself you’re not mad when Dave starts wearing them instead of the ones you bought him.

*

“Are we about to get tenta-fucked?” Dave says, as you make your way up a seaside cliff face somewhere on the East Coast. “Because, although I’m not opposed to the idea, per say, I’d like the writhing mass to take me out for dinner first. Pull out my seat at Olive garden like a gentleman. Fool around with me in the back of our truck. We could be like Jack and Rose, in that car on the titanic, except that one of us is a writhing mass of tentacles and the other is the coolest monster hunter extraordinaire ever to eat breadsticks with something with an octopus for a face. If I’m going to be tentafucked, I want to be tenta _-wooed_ first.”

You stop hallway up the cliff face to drive your sword hard into a mass of eyes and protruding tentacles, and pry it off like a barnacle into the sea below.

“I’m not sure that we’re dealing with a wooing scenario here,” you say, resuming the climb up the cliff. “This might be a love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of situation. A string of broken hearts and ruined buttholes, and a dastardly cephalopod Casanova who doesn’t spare a thought for all the lady’s he’s left behind.”

“Goddamn. If I get dumped by an eldritch abomination, you’re buying the Chunky Monkey when we’re done here.” He says.

You laugh, and spring yourself up to the top of the cliff.

You find yourself staring down the barrel of a rifle. The rifle’s owner is giving you one of the most manages to look somehow prim and terribly threatening all at once, and daughter is vomiting pitch black ichor behind her.

“Whatever job it is you think you’re doing,” she says, “I assure you your services are unnecessary. Rose will be just fine. We’ve dealt with this before, haven’t we sweetheart?”

Behind her, Rose is pulling off her sweater to reveal skin covered in tattoos, not circles designed for protection, you notice, but for confinement.

“Of course we have, mother dear.” Rose uncorks a bottle of sacramental wine, and pours it over her revealed arms, making them crackle with violet light. “We would hardly be a proper family if we didn’t know how to address an issue such as this one privately, after all. Whatever would the neighbours think?”

“I’ll tell you what” you say, politely ignoring the fact that the holy wine is making Rose’s skin blister and smoke. “What about you put down your gun, and I put away my sword, and we all have a nice long talk about why there are calamari deposits all up and down the coast, and what the fuck we’re going to do about it?”

Rose, behind her mother crackles grey and black, before falling back into the same bleached out white-and-pink as her mother. You can see some of the binding runes on her skin still smoking.

You think it might do Dave good to spend some time with someone his own age.

* 

Something like two years later, the world does its absolute best to end. Not that anyone really notices. It’s pretty spectacular, all rains of hellfire and a creature that should not be trying to crawl its way into this world from beyond, but it never really gets any farther than one green head, before it’s beaten back.

It’s almost disappointing.

Two and a half desperate weeks of running around the country, leaving offerings at this graveyard _here_ , drawing symbols of protection _there,_ and collecting tools and the most powerful tools they could find everywhere. In the end, all that makes it through the portal, when it tries to open up in a cave somewhere in the Arizona desert is one massive green head, and fluorescent rave-inspiring eyes.

It gets about that far, massive otherworldly mandibles moving threateningly, before John bashes it right in the face with his hammer. To be fair, it’s a big-fuck hammer, tricked out with every charm and spell in several books, but it’s still just a hammer. But John bashes it in the face, and it goes still.

Jade whoops from the back of her hellhound, and hops off the back to swing John up in a hug that looks like it could crush ribs. Dave, you see, affectionately punches rose on the shoulder, which is met by a single raised eyebrow and half a smile. He’s been up night after night after night, trying to trace leylines and supernatural activity and track down any half-enchanted artifact that might help for weeks. Under his glasses are eye bags so big he’d have to check them to get on a plane.

Rose looks much the same, thin and drawn, exhausted with the effort of spending so long where the boundary of the worlds was so thin. Still, she accepts a nooggie from John with good grace, and Dave even laughs when he gets tackled by John, ending up in a pile on the cavern floor.

You startle when you feel a hand clap you’re shoulder, but it’s just John’s dad, radiant with parental pride. He sets his pipe between his teeth and smiles at the display. “They grow up so fast, don’t they?”

“Sure.” You say around the sudden flash of anger.

“John’s going off to college in the fall.” He says. “He’s been asking if Dave would join him.”

You dropped out of highschool to take care of that kid, you think but don’t say. The least he can do is stay out of college to stay with you.

“I don’t know if that’s really what Dave wants.” You say instead, and realize with creeping dread that if it is what he wants, you can’t stop him.

“John said he seemed excited by the idea.” His dad says, “Think about it.”

You watch him scuffle on the floor with the three other kids, and wonder when, exactly, you lost him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Original fic can be found Here: http://dimir-charmer.tumblr.com/post/47964733705/dave-and-bro-as-hunters-by-request


End file.
